Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Forget concentration camps — they’re so 20th century! The latest craze in Vienna is for “integration camps”, which help prepare Austrian citizens for the future by requiring them to adapt to the various cultures of their country’s immigrant population.

The tone of this program is playful, but the organizers’ underlying purpose is deadly serious. Many thanks to Hermes for translating this article from Krone.at:

Daring artistic activity

‘Integration camps’ for Austrians in the middle of Vienna

A spectacular project will take place in Vienna in the next days. A group of artists will put up “integration camps” in the city as part of the Festwoche [Festival Week]. Only for Austrians, of course. According to the promoters, in these places people will be able to heal their phobia about minorities. The FPÖ is in outraged.

This satirical action goes under the name “Austrians, do integrate!”. It was created by the Viennese artists’ group “God’s Entertainment”. “We turn the debate about integration interculturally upside-down”, the creators of this initiative say. “After all the dominant culture, the courses on integration, and the language courses which our fellow immigrant citizens have to comply with, now we call on the natives to do the same thing. We invite them to at last be part of the big, complete and perfect Austria.”

To begin with, an evaluation of the need to adapt is to take place in the camps, and at the same time each participant will also be evaluated to determine which kind of integration program he needs. “Pack A” covers the “low requirement”. In this case, the course lasts just a few hours. “Pack B” lasts at least a full day and (according to description) for a complete beginner on integration there’s the “Pack C”, which lasts 2-3 days.

Headscarf training, forced marriage, halal slaughter

Foreigners of various origins are supposed to be in the camp to instruct. “We have Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, colored Africans, Turks, Kurds, Gypsies and Germans”, the organizers say. At the beginning, one deals in a playful way with problem-solving strategies. “If required, there will be offered also headscarf, forced marriage and home slaughter training”, the operators explained with a wink.

The first integration camp will be open from Wednesday through Saturday at the gates of the Urban Loritz Square. The second will be open from June 7 through 9 at the corner of Mariahilfe Street and Museum Square. The final one will run from June 14 through 16 in Meidlinger Square. Those wishing to take part will be received from 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. in the camps. “From 18:00 p.m. we’ll offer just a general guidance for Austrians with no special needs”, the organizers say.

The FPÖ is outraged: “A monstrosity”

The FPÖ is, as expected, not taking any pleasure from this satirical project: “This is a monstrosity among monstrosities,” the speaker for cultural politics Heidemarie Unterreiner claims. She does not understand the reason why such monkey business is also financed from the generous funds dedicated to the Festival Week. “In marked contrast to this there are the festivals in Salzburg, which preserve a cultural concept to appeal to the audience, and which year after year delight guests from all over the world,” the FPÖ member says.

The Integration Camps that are to be held in Vienna later this month were initially meant to bring together not Austrians and foreigners, but Austrians and their politicians.

According to a source within the government, ministers had originally devised the camps as a way to combat disaffection and inefficacy. Austrians would, according to the plan, have been confined with their representatives for one day, during which time they would not only have encountered politicians elucidating governmental policies in the clearest bureaucratic idiom, but also learned about the mores of the ruling elite.

However, ministers were forced to abandon the scheme after disastrous trials.

“We found that the Austrian people reacted to prolonged exposure to politicians as an organism reacts to a virus,” said Johan Johanus, a professor at the University of Vienna. “Once exposure has reached a certain amount, the body begins to shut down to defend itself against politicospeak. Generally this happens after about two hours, but can occur much sooner if the pol with whom one is paired is pointedly verbose.”

Professor Johanus identified three stages in the shut-down mechanism. First the body begins producing an elevated amount of cerumen to block as much politicospeak as possible. Cerumen, however, is easily penetrated by the pol’s voices, which are 106.993% more grating than the national average. Thus, the brain itself must begin to take action, initiating the second stage. The brain’s grey matter, inundated with alarming amount of illogical propositions, starts to disassociate itself from the cerebrum and attempts to escape through the ears, nostrils, and mouth. One test-subject’s matter was so impatient that it simply burst through the occipital bone, “leaving a rather cumbersome mess for me to clean up,” sniffed Professor Johanus. Unfortunately pols, captivated by their own grandiloquence, tend not to notice what has befallen their now comatose interlocutor and continue their harangue apace. It is left to the Austrian’s soul to wrench itself from its body and flee shrieking to Hades.

“I’ve always found the idea of Hades superlatively chilling,” squeaked one test-subject’s shade, who was kind enough to grant us an interview on his way to the underworld. “But then this pol started talking about this place called London, and how he wanted to make Vienna like London, so I just thought, ‘Tartarus or bust, baby.’”

This "project" is completely satirical, and not meant to be anything else by its initiators. It is pointing out exactly what we are dealing with here on this and related blogs. I am slightly astonished that the FPÖ fails to appreciate that.

Well, the 'little' infidels had better realize but fast that, once Muslims achieve supremacy, there will be NOWHERE to run to escape from the loudspeaker drone of mind-numbing Islamic prayers that run from before dawn through sunset and the corresponding Friday sermons from imams that make Chicago thugs and Italian mafia look like Boy Scouts while Muslim men plot to kidnap unclean infidel girls to forcibly revert and 'marry' so that Muslim men may rape them and make more 'little' Muslims....

It's not satirical. It's creepy.In my house, if i want to colour my walls in pink, i will colour them in pink, and no one outside from my home has the right to tell me to colour my walls in brown!Austria to austrians

- headscarf (no, thanks)- forced marriage and home slaughter training (I believed it was illegal in the West)

The FPÖ is outraged: “A monstrosity” - Yeah, same here. I though the same.

“We turn the debate about integration interculturally upside-down”So wrong: the "right way up" debate was never there to begin with. The irony of this is entirely lost on these terminally tolerant multiculties.